


God Used Me as a Hammer

by illwynd



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Psychological Trauma, Torture, Unreliable Narration, Violence, minor background characters - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-22
Updated: 2020-07-22
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:21:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25439896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illwynd/pseuds/illwynd
Summary: When the Bifrost was broken, Loki fell. But what happened after?(A sort of kaleidoscopic recounting of Loki's adventures and return from the void.)
Relationships: Loki & Thor (Marvel)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 34





	God Used Me as a Hammer

**Author's Note:**

> So I was organizing my WIPs folder the other day and found this weird little thing that I wrote years ago--shortly after Avengers 1 came out, to give you an idea--and never posted. Kinda feelin' it today, so here we are.
> 
> Title stolen from the Tom Waits song "Hoist That Rag."

Loki fell. How he fell does not matter. He fell from a precipice, sharp-edged and bare and lonesome. From a home, from light, from those who he once believed loved him.

He fell. He fell through darkness. He fell.

He was caught.

##  **I.**

He fell, and he is caught in the warmth of a healing hand, and he is unconscious when they find him. Unconscious, his body cold as death, his skin pale as if star-blanched. It is not known whether he is a wayward emissary, an outcast, a mere unfortunate. It is not known whence he came.

“Asgardian,” says one, examining the shredded clothing on his body, pinching a ragged leather edge between long, sharp claws.

Consciousness does not return. He is unconscious even as his eyes open, deep wells of green water, reflecting the distant dark light. He is quiet and empty. He does not move of his own accord.

They bend over him, staring at the shape of his face and chittering amongst themselves.

They call for the Other, who will know what is to be done with him.

* * *

He fell. He fell and he is caught, and his body is as the fragile tremble a spider feels, a tremble to stillness on silken thread, and the owners of the web come in the night to see what they have captured.

By the time he wakes, the poison is inside him, working. By the time he wakes, he is bound so tightly he cannot move. By the time he wakes, all the soft and vulnerable things inside him are already burned away, the acid spread hissing at its purple edges, and he can feel the darkness growing in its place, like mold.

And something soft and inexorable is invading his throat, muffling his halting scream.

By the time the threads are sheared away, he is remade, reshaped, his flesh flayed apart into leathery wings.

* * *

He fell, and he proves difficult to catch. He—unlucky as he is—falls direct into their midst and they can scent value in him as a predator scents tender flesh, and they track him when he runs. It takes days. He is slippery. Through empty wastes he escapes, mingling with shadows. In bitter and unfamiliar wilderness he survives. But they track him, and they gain ground until he is caught in a snare of hunters. 

Weaponless, mindless, too weakened and maddened by the fall to even conjure, still he takes down thirteen of their strongest before he is overwhelmed.

* * *

He fell. He fell, and he is not caught at all. No one notes the cry of his impact; somehow he did not sleep even in the endless darkness, and he feels the shock, the pain, the hollow misery of finding himself alone. Bloodied, broken, he lies on the plain of barren rock until he can force himself onto hands and knees. He makes slow progress, stopping at times to sob against the bruised skin of his arms.

By the time he reaches the citadel in the distance, he walks unaided, body thin as a new bough bent in the wind.

His voice, so long unused for anything other than pleas and curses to powers that are not listening, is a barely audible rasp as he comes to them and makes his bargain.

##  **II.**

“What use are you, little insect? Little fallen god?”

His breath is a weak whine, and he huddles over, fingers curled around his own shoulders, the skin under them damp and cold. He hurts. He is lost and alone and they have shown him so much.

The answer, when he gives it, is a stammer, a plea. He racks his brain for all the hidden knowledge that he has stolen over the years. Every mystery he once knew. Every secret he can betray. No one he ever swore it to could possibly matter now; they betrayed _him_ , and he has been alone for so long…

He doesn’t care what he tells. Later, the door to his cell clangs closed, leaving him feeling empty, cold, hollow. He longs for his captors to return. 

* * *

When his captors come to prise secrets from his lips he sinks back against the chains, the shackles rubbing at yellowed, crusted skin, and he watches them with clever eyes from the shadows of the cell they have given him. In this small domain he is king, and these stones, marked with the rust of his blood, are his throne.

He has let them discover it for themselves, who he is. The one who never wields the knife or the whip or the flame, the one who stands behind those who do—that one has found his name. He knows it, and he is pleased.

“The god of lies,” that one murmurs, the air of the cell vibrating with expectation, “will give us truths.”

“Will I?” he breathes, seeming as if he thinks of smiling. Generously. Magnanimously. A king to his subjects.

In this small domain, upon a stone floor barely three paces across, his whim is law.

It seems today his wish is for pain.

* * *

They do not harm him. They watch him. They feed him. They demand nothing, tend to his physical needs but leave him be. They do not speak to him, even the lackey who slides his food through the slot in the door. They leave him in a room with silence, a room where distant footsteps and ringing drips of water grow loud and soften and grow loud again. They do not harm him, do not torture him. They wait until he peels back the bandages and removes them, the brown-smudged strips crumpling in the corner until another silent lackey comes to clear them away. A clever look comes to his eyes—comes  _ back  _ to his eyes, definitely—and a suspicious one, and he makes only a careful, tentative attempt to attract the attention of his hosts. He knows what they are doing. He will not disgrace himself by clawing at the bars of the cage they have furnished so comfortably for him; he will think, he will plan, he will wait until he sees an opening, an opportunity.

He sits and waits in the silent room, with distant footsteps and ringing drops of water and the awareness that he is alone—not even the lackeys pay him any notice—like a weight that wearies him, that drags him toward the ground.

He wonders, idly, if perhaps the gravity is in fact stronger here. He decides it is not; it is in his mind.

He forces himself to stop pacing. He will not disgrace himself, he thinks. No matter what has happened, he has his dignity. No matter that he forgot the meaning of it while he fell. No matter that he felt it was stripped away from him like his Aesir skin at an icy touch, a terrible truth coming to light and proving after all these years that he could never have been what they—he could never have been given what he was promised—that he was—

Distant footsteps and ringing drops of water yet still the room is silent and he does not notice when he begins to mutter to himself, like a heartbeat that might keep him alive.

They  _ listen. _

* * *

He tells them nothing.

They do not know what they have trapped; they are unprepared to deal with one such as him. He is no frail and wavering child to weep and beg at the first touch of knife or brand to his flesh. He is no cringing beast to bow at the mere threat of death—as if they could slay him. He is too strong for them. He cackles like a mad thing at their attempts to wring obedience from him. He is the god of mischief—he is a  _ god _ —and he does not beg for a mercy he does not need. He does not give in to their demands.

In the end it is they who must bargain, they who must offer and promise and plead. They have been convinced of his power, his strength. They are in awe of him. And they are contrite, heads dipping in apology when they come to beg his aid. 

It is a strange, sweet satisfaction on his tongue.

Perhaps he will agree to be their god as well.

##  **III.**

He takes the scepter in his hands, and he feels oddly proud that he has finally proven himself worthy, now that the scars are healing, fading, nearly gone.

Worthy to rule, worthy to be an ally, an equal, to powers Asgard knows not. And it was they who suggested the arrangement; he would have been suspicious had they guided him by the hand to the idea that perhaps some small pocket of the universe might be spared for him, for that was a trick he had often used and one he would recognize immediately. But no, they treated him truly as an equal, with no attempt to lure or deceive.

And it didn’t matter if the Other sneered at the quality of his ambition, as long as they gave what they promised.

He holds the scepter in his hands and he thinks of home. He thinks, for the first time since the end of his fall, of Thor. Thor who hurled him into the abyss, Thor who had meant to kill him for daring to trespass on his territory.

He clutches the scepter a little tighter, and he smiles. In a way, it has all worked out so well.

* * *

The light is a dim, beautiful blue in his eyes as he takes the scepter. He has never seen a light more welcome, more lovely. It seems to hum, softly, like a lover in the next room while one feigns sleep in the cool morning. It seems to pulse, gently, like an ocean tide. It seems to spread through him as if he were translucent glass, and he imagines that it somehow heals him. That it firms up the fractures and clears away the fog of pain.

He cradles the scepter close in the crook of his arm so that the light is near.

It whispers such things to him so that the mission he thought, secretly, was madness—now it seems the most sublime wisdom. It feels no longer at all strange to find himself so eager to obey.

The light is a dim, beautiful blue that leaves no room for shadow.

* * *

He gives a brief, short nod as the Other hands him his scepter, the curved blade of its end glinting in the light, silhouetted against a glow of blue. He keeps his face impassive as he takes it; he has years enough of practice.

He knows what he is expected to do, and until that moment he believed he would do it.

But, as his own power floods him again, spreading up from his fingertips, a trembling blue trail along his wrists, up the pulse in his neck… his own power again, coming from the cool column in his hand. It is somehow attuned to him, just as it is attuned to its target.

Standing in the midst of the army that he is expected to use to bring war to Midgard, he investigates the nature of that connection as swiftly as he can. He feels, and loathes, their massed impatience for battle; he acts out the motions of readying himself to call out to the treasure, the prize  _ his new master _ desires.

He has not thought of home since before the end of his fall, but he finds it comforts him now, oddly, to think that his family will never know what he does in the next moment. That they will never know what truly became of him. That maybe they will forever think he perished in the swirling shards of Bifrost, or that he wanders eternally, between life and death, in the dark.

He takes one deep breath and summons the catastrophe of the tesseract’s power along the thread that connects them.

The conflagration creates a new star in the sky, though it is a sky not visible from any of the nine worlds.

* * *

The moment the scepter touches his palm is the beginning of the true end of his fall. His endless, spinning tumble into the darkest depths, his final true education in the ways of agony and misery and hate.

He closes his eyes and feels, with the scepter’s power, for the site on which he will finally land, will finally come crashing down, shattered yet unbroken, a dark guiding light for a realm of the blind, a voice, a scream, a song. He will bring all that he has learned. He will feed them on his godly flesh. They will worship him, as befits the one who has survived this ruination, and he will show them mercy as his kindred never did—his false kindred, those who claimed the right to decide and to rule over them, who rode across their skies and rained thunder across their fields and yet never saved them, never, not one infant stricken with rotting sickness did they pluck from the mortal ground to heal, not one round-bellied woman birthing and bleeding alone, not one boy thrall-turned-whore crushed by shame, never, only the warriors, the kings, those as near the gods’ gleaming perfection as a mortal could attain. The Aesir knew no mercy as they knew no pain, but now he knew all, and he would save them from one another. From the cruelty of living. From the freedom to be cast out to die.

He readies himself for the last part of his fall, disdain for the tormentors around him keeping his eyes on the smooth curve of the scepter, keeping his mind on the pulse of power that is now his. Conviction burns like fire in his eyes until the skin around them is ashes and embers. It comes out in slick sweat upon his skin. He will land among the mortals and there he will be what he was always meant to be.

He will save them as he was not saved.

He believes this. And he does not. A small voice inside his head whispers what a fool he is, selfish and a liar and a cheat. 

It laughs at him as he grits his teeth.

“You will never be anyone’s savior. Not even your own.”

He pretends he does not hear.

“What do you care about the stricken mortal infants? You never saved them either. Not until it was a convenient story to tell yourself about all your glorious reasons for everything you’ve done.”

He forces the voice into silence, like swallowing bile back down. 

##  **IV.**

Thunder follows lightning, and in the next moment Thor is there, tearing away the flimsy restraints and dragging them both into the air as the mortals shout and scramble behind them.

They hit the ground on a rock precipice, skidding, sliding, and Thor shoves him down onto his back, standing over him, hammer in hand.

Loki pushes himself up onto his elbows, jolted, aching, spitting dust from his tongue. He ignores the demands and threats that Thor is already bursting with, because he understands this. If Thor does not begin this way he will begin with undignified and idiotic pleading—because Thor has always been just as good at somehow wounded apologies as he has been at offending in the first place, and neither one prevents the recurrence of the other—and neither one of them would benefit from that. It would only make Thor angrier when Loki rebuffed him, as well as making Loki almost sick with annoyance.

As Loki would have to rebuff him, because Thor was not clever enough ever to guess that Loki was doing this for a purpose: that it would be better for his beloved Midgard to be conquered in a swift attack by  _ him _ than to fall under the bloody sway of those who had sent him.

He takes only a moment—cannot help himself, really—when Thor’s eyes are on his own and Thor’s hand is warm on his neck, pulling him closer than he can let himself be.

It is not time yet for that, and Loki pulls the mask back over his face, laughs, and tears himself away.

* * *

It happens so quickly.

All Loki knows is that he is falling again. He is being tossed through the sky, disoriented, thunder and lightning crashing around him, stars whirling and whipping past his eyes, the world coming apart, but this time he is not falling alone. This time he is gripped in an inexorable hand—this time he cannot even dream that his fate is not already foretold. This time he knows what is in store for him, what horrors the future holds as he is bent and reshaped to an evil will. This time he knows, because it has happened before and he learned how powerless he is to stop it from happening again

He falls, and he is hurled hard to the ground, and all the pain comes back again. All the fear. His bones shattered then, and it echoes in the ache now as he forces himself up to his feet, the sudden taste of blood in the back of his throat, and the one who pushed him from that height is still there, looming before him, casting a shadow across him so that Loki cannot see their face.

Fallen hard upon the stone, the sky all dark above him, yet at least he did not lose everything in the fall this time. He still has his wits about him; he did not slip into the darkness of unconsciousness. He feels for a weapon, a blade, for anything with which to defend himself. If he must fall again, he must at least prove that he will not go meekly.

And some quiet part of his mind whispers that he knows already the weak points in his opponent’s armor, though he does not know how he knows it.

He lunges. The knife goes in, twists, and hot fluid gushes out across his knuckles as he withdraws his hand.

“Brother?”

He knows that voice, and the pain and panic in it.

Loki’s vision begins to clear only then.

* * *

Thor comes for him—thunder and lightning tearing through the sky—and Loki is only disappointed that he has come so late. He missed the show, the demonstration Loki gave of his power and his resolve. It would have been so much better to have his brother confront him there, in front of the crowd of huddled mortals.

There Loki would have fought him. Would have taken great delight in vanquishing his brother, having that victory proven true and immortal by the weight of awareness upon them, as if they fought for all of Midgard’s future, all of Midgard’s soul.

Perhaps it would have been so.

He thinks in the end he would have spared his brother’s life. With a hank of Thor’s hair in his hand, the broad golden neck bared to his blade he would have paused just there, with the pulse throbbing against metal, a thin line of red appearing on Thor’s skin, and then whispered what would seem to all the mortals to be a bargain into his ear. Loki’s wisdom, and his mercy, would be on display for all to see.

He thinks of that as his brother shoves him to the ground, demanding that Loki surrender at once, that he submit and go whimpering back to Asgard. Thor yanks him close, one big, warm hand on Loki’s neck.

This is Thor at his cruelest. He would steal from Loki even the dignity of a fight. The dignity of hating him.

Loki stares into Thor’s earnest eyes and feels like he has fallen all over again. It is all he can do to maintain his composure.

But in the end he is spared; the mortal clad in the metal suit flies into Thor’s shocked form and drags him away.

Loki sits down to wait.

* * *

There is thunder and lightning, and he feels sick deep inside. Sicker still when his brother appears, bitter anger written across his face, summoned to this realm by a great expenditure of power—and he had believed they would not go to the trouble, had thought it almost could not be done—and furious with him, furious at the reappearance of the once-dead.

Thor hurls him down to the mortal ground, and Loki hisses like a snake, and he lies and smiles and deceives, and acid wells up to fill the emptiness inside.

If he is not careful, his brother will see. His brother will know. And then Loki will be doomed.

He curls around himself, lying, spitting in vicious terror like a wounded animal. If it would make any difference, he would beg Thor to leave him be. To not interfere, for this is nothing he can strike with the flare of his rage and his hammer. What has begun must be allowed to continue to its finish, and only then, when he has fulfilled his part of the bargain, will Loki dream of freedom for himself again.

Thor pulls him close, one big hand curled around the nape of his neck, and Loki reels away from it.

He draws down the veil of his own rage, for the only other alternative is to let Thor see what he has become. A thrall and not a king at all.

##  **V.**

There is a battle. There is a war. He is captured, or not. An alien army pours down through a hole in the sky and they are stopped by a brilliant and deadly flash, or not. He fights his brother from afar, or hand to hand on a rooftop, both bleeding and scuffling and furious. He is silent and fey, or he laughs like a maniac, or there is terror twisting his frozen smile.

It ends the only way it is possible for it to end.

* * *

It ends in the only way it is possible for it to end.

The armies of Chitauri come, and Midgard is soon pacified. Their leaders flee underground, for the most part, but those who remain are ready to bargain.

The heroes are scattered to the winds.

Loki takes his throne at the first reasonable opportunity, merely to consolidate and affirm his power as life returns to normal—or something near it—for the majority of the mortals.

He rules kindly. He takes no reprisals against their soldiers, and only the mildest for their leaders.

He had not seen Thor since the first day of the war, and he suspects his brother has somehow returned home.

He sends the tesseract off, places the scepter to glow with its cool light ensconced on the wall above his throne, and whispers a farewell curse under his breath as the last of the aliens disappear again through the portal, for he will need no aid now to keep the Midgardians under his thumb.

He sits and waits and wonders, knowing all the while that this is exactly what he asked for. What he demanded as he made his bargain, feeling sure that it would satisfy him.

Yet now he feels no happiness at all.

* * *

It ends the only way it is possible for it to end.

It ends in ruin.

It ends in flame and smoke and darkness, for the mortals chose to stand firm, though it cost them their lives.

He lies at the edge of the crater, blind-eyed but knowing by feel that he has but moments left, knowing that his flesh is burned away to black ash, knowing that all things around him are long since dead. He cannot move. He is beyond healing. 

In his last moments he murmurs to himself a childhood song, hating how it feels to be alone and hating all the choices he could not make even more than the ones he did.

He wonders whether Thor escaped the destruction. 

He wonders if his brother would have mourned for him. 

* * *

It ends the only way it is possible for it to end. 

He lies embedded in the crushed floor of the tower, thrown at the hands of a monster. He thinks for a while that his spine has snapped, until he realizes it is more the humiliation and the misery of losing that keeps him still.

Some part of him believes that if he does not get up, he will not have to face what follows.

It is all the more bitter that it was in this very place that the man of iron predicted this, proclaimed that there could be no possible victory for him. No crown, no throne. Just another fall.

It is true, he thinks, and no part of him protests. He is as doomed to defeat as he is to surviving it. To knowing it and to knowing his own powerlessness.

He lies there, unable to stop himself from whimpering, and his last few moments of freedom (such as it is—the freedom to hurt, the freedom to bleed and weep and fail, the freedom to have fate conspire against you) are filled with regret.

* * *

It ends the only way it is possible for it to end.

He waits only long enough for the monster to depart, and then he begins to move, his body responding to the pain, to the agony of it, for his flesh remembers what comes next after bones are broken and bruises blackened. When his legs do not respond, he pulls himself along by his arms, slithering on his belly.

He must get away. He must, for he does not wish to know what they will do to him now.

Thor… after what he did, he cannot expect Thor will help him. He cannot expect his brother will listen to his pleas.

They will be lies anyway. Every moment, everything he has chosen since the moment of his fall… if he did not enjoy being defeated, broken, why would he keep doing it? Some part of him must desire it. Some part of him must have chosen this.

Not his body, however, which still notes every twinge of pain.

He drags himself across the floor, pausing briefly in the middle to cough a stream of thin, bloody fluid from his lungs, to wipe at the sweat springing up on his face, to curse all monsters, with himself at the head of the list. He resumes his painful crawl again to the clicking and scraping of his bones… so that he does not hear the sound of footsteps. Not until some sense tells him he is being watched does he turn, twisting his body with difficulty—how pathetic he must look!—and looks up to see them gathered over him, weapons at the ready—as if he still presented any threat at all—and glaring.

He slumps down again, mind blanking to make ready for what must come next, waiting for the hammer to fall.

* * *

It ends the only way it is possible for it to end.

There is concrete dust in his hair, bruises and lacerations all across his skin, but no one now can say he did not  _ try _ . That he did not make a solemn attempt. Even if they flayed him alive, he could say in truth that he fought, that he put forth all his power into achieving what he set out to do upon this realm.

It is not  _ his _ fault that his opponents proved so brutal and so fierce, is it?

And he even survived. He was not truly expecting that. Defeat, he expected, secretly. Not survival. 

It seems luck is with him, as it has not been in a very long time.

The sound that sneaks out—it is not a laugh, bubbling up through him with a feeling he has long forgotten. He knows his suffering is far from over. He will be blamed for everything, of course he will be. He will be detested, punished, forgotten. But alive. And perhaps someday,  _ someday _ , he will again have the chance to feel something aside from agony and misery. He can wait. He can endure. He has learned that quite well. 

So it is not a laugh. It is a cowardly whimper. A whine of pain. Let no one say otherwise.

* * *

It ends the only way it is possible for it to end. 

##  **VI.**

The taste of twelve-year-old scotch lingers on his tongue far too long. Chemical, almost numbing, with no sweetness at all to balance out the bitterness of dark earth, but at least it masks the taste of blood.

He clears his throat, though he does not yet know what he means to say.

* * *

The taste of twelve-year-old scotch lingers on his tongue as he pleads. 

“I was but a tool in a stronger hand. What was I to do?”

Thor does not want to listen, though for once Loki speaks only the truth, the only truth he knows.

“I did no more than survive. Do you blame me for that? Would you rather I had not?”

Thor fixes him then with a look that he cannot read. One he does not understand.

Thor reaches for him then, and Loki almost leans into his touch. The first friendly touch he has felt, in… in years. 

Loki almost sighs, at the knowledge that after this they will be going home. And on the way there, if he can make Thor listen—if he can find some way to explain, if he can make Thor understand what happened to him and why he had to—then maybe, maybe—

Thor touches only to take hold of him to put a muzzle on his mouth. Shackles on his limbs. It is done before Loki can say another word. 

He finds himself breathing heavily, blinking. Shock welling up in his throat. Eyes stinging. 

The taste lingering in his mouth is bitter, chemical, with undertones of blood.

* * *

The taste of twelve-year-old scotch, smokey and bright, clashes against the sweetness of the words he hisses the moment they are alone. 

Goading Thor was always the simplest way, and it is only more pleasurable now, after everything. 

He wants Thor’s violence, every drop of it. That is the taste he wants on his tongue now. So he vows his vengeance. Threatens everything. Tells Thor every foul thing he will do once he is free again. Tells him how nothing Thor loves will ever be safe. 

He cannot bear for this to end this way. He will not go willingly. Not alive. No matter what he has to say, to vow, he will not let it end like this.

He thinks he has won when Thor takes hold of him, fury written on his face. But instead—

Metal seals across his mouth, clangs shut around his wrists. 

Loki has never felt such rage as he feels then. All the idle promises he just made, as humiliation sets in, he repeats them in his own mind and wishes them true.

The bitterness on his tongue is locked inside with him, and it will only grow.

* * *

The taste of twelve-year-old scotch lingers on his tongue as he holds his silence.

He anticipates the shackles. He anticipates the muzzle. He glares fire at his brother as he does it, and he does not give him a single venomous word to justify whatever may come after.

If Thor will do this, let him bear all the blame. 

Loki walks, back straight and head high despite the chains, as Thor takes him back to the place from which he fell. As if he had never been gone.

As if none of it ever happened at all. 


End file.
